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I 



DEMOCRACY, 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC 



PARKE GODWIN 




« These volumes will show that the author feels strongly the need of deep social 
ehan-s of a spiritual revolution in Christendom, of a new bond between man and 
S^ "ew'sense of the relation between man and his Make, At ^the same 
time thev will show his firm belief that our present low *&?^fi.««&* 
idea of which is wealth, cannot last forever ; that the mass of men are > not doomed 
hopelessly and irresistibly to the degradation of mind and heart m winch they are 
now sunk ; that a new comprehension of the true dignity of a social being is to re- 
model social institutions and manners ; that in Christianity and in .the powers and 
principles of human nature, we have the promise of something holier and happier 
than now exists. It is a privilege to live in this faith, and a privilege to communi- 
cate it to others. [Dr. Chunking's Preface to the last edition of his Works. 



NetB-$crrli: 

J. WINCHESTER, XXX ANN-STREET 



1844. 



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30432 



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1899 ) 



OF WASH" 



INTRODUCTORY 



Ours are new words; they express new thoughts; yet, we 
hope, that the newness, either of words or thoughts, will not 
prevent the reader from giving what we are about to say, a calm 
and profound attention. If we employ language that to many 
may be strange ; if we utter thoughts that have the appearance of 
novelty; we still intend that our phrases and meaning shall be 
as clear as the nature of our discussion will allow. We are about 
to speak of Democracy, but in no party sense ; not as it is spouted 
in ward meetings, nor slavered through the columns of news- 
papers; but of Democracy as a God -ordained principle of social 
government, which will give to every individual his precise 
place in society, which will develope and perfect all -the elements 
of human nature, which will recognize the inherent rights and 
spiritual majesty of man,and which,in the end, willmake the "king- 
doms of this Earth the kingdoms of our God, and of his Christ." It 
is of a kind, this Democracy, which has not yet been treated of in 
Presidents' messages: it has made but small figure on the floor of 
Congress; neither of our great parties sets up claims to the exclu- 
sive°ownership of it; while, at the same time, it is broad and 
benevolent enough to take in all parties and all creeds, however 
different their tenets, or apparently iireconcileable their aims. We 
mean not the Destructive and Revolutionary Democracy, which 
has done so much to change the world— but the Constructive and 
Pacific Democracy, which is destined to do infinitely more in a 
still nobler change.* 

* In the general outline of the few following sections we have closely 
followed X^fouoH and eloquent" Afenifctt » of ihe Dernocratie 
pl^hqae written bv Victor Constderant; bat we h.ve not scrupled to 
mVit" v .hat paper hi many ways so as to adapt it to the *tate of opinion 
S 4 count y P The writer is alone responsible for what is here said 



PART FIRST. 



§ I. — ANCIENT AND FEUDAL SOCIETY, 

History makes us acquainted with various societies in the Past. 
These are distinguished from each ether by many diverse traits, 
yet they have have many characteristics in common. In Judea, 
in Egypt, in Greece, in Rome, the life of society had phases 
peculiar to itself in each, although in many respects a broad 
similitude is traceable through the manifold developments of all. 
Alike in all, the only acknowledged principle of action was force ; 
war was their only politics ; conquest and glory their chief aim ; 
while slavery, or the subjection of man to man, in the most 
thorough, inhuman, and barbarous manner, was the great feature 
of their national economy. Slavery was the base and War the 
summit of their whole social structure. The producer, or in 
other words, the Worker, was universally a slave ; the Freeman, 
whether plebeian or patrician, alone was allowed to make war 
and to consume. The sentiment of humanity was bounded by 
the narrow horizon of a creed or country. To the Jew, all things 
beyond Judea, were unclean ; to the Greek and Roman, the term 
foreigner was a synonym for barbarian. In all old civilized 
societies, then, we see only implacable domination abroad; only 
tyranny, and the insuperable distinctions of caste at home. 

The feudal order, though an improvement on the ancient s»>cie- 
ties, retained some of their worst abuses. Feudalism, being an 
effect of conquest, became very soon a mere organized conquest. 
War remained its leading fact — war, and the traditional but per- 
manent consecration of the distinctions of primitive conquest. It 



6 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

was relieved, it is true, by some few meliorating influences; it 
called forth, as even the worst arrangements have done, some 
few virtues: it developed in a iew, a manly sense of personal 
worth and individuality: its system of economy was a trifle less 
severe and brutal in the subjection of man to man. The senti- 
ment of humanity, too, warmed by the first rays of the rising sun 
of Christianism, began to stretch beyond the contracted limits of 
country. Nations and races began to feel the ties of fraternity, 
and to connect themselves in closer bonds, though still in obe- 
dience to the laws of feudal hierarchy. Throughout Europe, the 
nobles, legitimate heirs of the first conquerors, regarded themselves 
only as equals, while they trampled to the dust the clowns and 
commoners, whom they scarcely looked upon as belonging to the 
same species. But the latter everywhere enslaved, grew to- regard 
each other as brothers, and thus unconsciously, in the darkness 
and distresses of the Present, prepared the way for that Future 
of justice and truth which was destined to wrest from their 
haughty oppressors, the privileges which had been so long 
withheld. The spirit and right of the feudal times, was the spirit 
of aristocracy and the right of the nobles; and both continued to 
exist, until the French and other fearful revolutions, gave them 
a blow that sent them howling in the agonies of death. 

§ II. — THE NEW OR CHRISTIAN AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY.. 

On the ruins of the old and feudal society, there has gradually 
grown up the elements and forms of a new order. A change has 
been wrought which is manifesting itself in the development of 
industry, science and art, in the silent and irresistible conquests 
of mind over force, in the genius of creation triumphing over the 
genius of destruction — in the substitution of noble, sacred Work, 
for base, unholy War. The right of modern societies has come 
to be the general right; their principle is the Christian principle 
of the specific unity of the whole human race in humanity, 
whence the political dogma of the equality of all citizens before 
the state ; and their spirit is the spirit of democracy. True, in 
the older nations, the division lines of former days are still drawn ; 
the badges of caste are still worn ; the privileges and honors of 
nobility are perpetuated. But they are perpetuated mostly in 
form. They cannot be said to be the controlling spirit of the 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 7 

present times. The French Revolution in the old world, the 
American Revolution in the new, struck a battle-axe into the 
rotten timbers of past institutions which has shattered them into 
slivers. The better classes, the nobility, the monarchs may gov- 
ern — but they do so virtually in the name, with the consent, and 
for the welfare of the people. The mass is a new word that has 
crept into ail modern languages, and which indicates the existence 
of a new fact. The mass, through so many weary years, the 
despised and spoliated hewers of wood and drawers of water, 
have proclaimed their equal manhood. They assert that they 
are an essential element in the community. They stand before 
us with the honest faces, the broad shoulders, the hard muscles, 
the swelling hearts of men ; they demand of us that they be ad- 
mitted into fellowship : they claim their younger brothers-share 
of the patrimony of the common Father. With haggard and 
malignant looks, their eyes darting fiery impatience and their 
hands grasping the red torches of fury ; through streets flowing 
with blood and plains strewed with the dying ; in the midst of 
agonizing cries and wild maniac rejoicings, they have fought 
their way to where they now stand, and there dwells not on this, 
nor any side, of Heaven, the power for whom it would be safe to 
resist their just appeals. The existence of the mass, we say, is a new 
fact, demonstrated in an irregular wild way — but with somewhat 
of significance and emphasis. 

4 III — SEPARATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLE FROM THE 
REVOLUTIONARY. 

In several of the more liberal and recent European constitutions 
of government; in all the constitutions, we believe, of the United 
States, the universal and equal Right of man is broadly asserted, 

This new Right, this democratic Right, having entered into the 
world by revolution, having been proclaimed, established, and 
defended by revolution, advancing from triumph to triumph by 
revolution, is it at all surprising that the principle of democracy 
and the principle of revolution should have been confounded? 

The new Right might have been incarnaced in society by the 
consentaneous and progressive action of reform and organization , 



8 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

which would have completed, by peaceable means, the natural 
transformation of the past society in all its. departments. 

But this natural movement, this absorption of the old (and 
secretion of the new, which constitutes the healthy growth of all 
the organized creation, and which might have wrought the quiet 
and unobstructed renewal of society,) not having been seconded 
and directed with intelligence by those in authority; the new 
spirit not having been wisely and liberally guided in its mighty 
expansion, the work of change v/as left to the arbitrament of 
explosive violence. 

It has almost invariably occurred in the contests of adverse 
interests, that the usurper grows selfish and the wronged furious. 
A wild assault and reckless repulse is followed by long years of 
relentless battle, — by the impetuous shock of armies under whose 
tread the earth shakes to its centre, — until slow Time decides an 
issue which had long before been decided in the eternal laws of 
Providence. 

When the hour has come for the Past to yield its abuses and 
be changed, its resistance only provokes warfare and makes its 
defeat the more signal. The new principle, by being resisted, 
instead of proceeding to the task of infusing itself into existing 
arrangements, is exclusively absorbed in the fight with the Past; 
it wastes its energies in unnecessary expenditures of strength, 
and it confounds itself with, and takes the character of, a mani- 
jestation of mere Violent Protest — Revolution — War. This is' a 
most grave error. It leaves the whole task of organizing the 
3N T ew Order, a thing to be done. 

Now, this is the task which is comfnitted to our epoch — this 
the problem which the genius of Destiny has summoned us to 
solve. With the vigorous arm of a lusty youth, we have shat- 
tered what was bad in the Past. We have gone through with 
the terrible work of destruction. We have broken into the 
ancient domain of Authority and Oppression. We must now add 
the infinitely higher work of true democratic construction and 
adjustment. 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 



§ IV. — THE REVOLUTIONARY WORK FINISHED, THE DEMOCRATIC 
WORK HARDLY BEGUN. 

Our modern democratic revolutions, though they have accom- 
plished some good, have chiefly exhibited the new principle of the 
Rights of man, in its abstract and negative aspects. They have 
swept away the last remains of the Feudal system, founded upon 
war and the aristocratic distinctions of birth ; they have estab- 
lished a representative system in politics, which, inasmuch as it 
reposes on a principle of election independent of the accident of 
birth, is a decided advance upon pre-existing systems; they have 
rendered elementary instruction more accessible to all classes of 
the people; and they have called into life, under the inspiration 
of Christianity, a deeper sense of the worth and dignity of the 
individual soul. This is their good. But oh ! how much they 
have left undone ! — how much is there which they could not dol 
They have left without organization, without direction, without 
rule, the whole immense sphere of Industry! They have abol- 
ished the wardenships, the guilds, the corporations of the ancient 
time, — all of which answered the purpose in a feeble way, of a 
partial organization of Labor — but they have not supplied their 
place by a better organization-. They have opened to a laissez- 
faire the most absolute, to a competition the most anarchical, to a 
war the most blind, and consequently to the Monopoly of great 
capitalists, the whole social and economical Workshop of the 
World, — the vast field on which is effected the Production and 
Distribution of Universal Wealth! Here is their grand defect; 
here is their radical* weakness; here is the practical vice whicli 
condemns the entire machinery of revolution as inefficient and 
unsound. 

The imperfect state in which revolutionary and destructive, or 
rather negative Democracy, has left its work, keeps open a sluice 
by which a deluge of wrongs is let in upon mankind. In spite 
of the supposed liberality of our new principles, in spite of the 
destruction of old abuses, in spite of the constitutional equality of 
citizens, in spite of the abolition of exclusive privileges in the 
sphere of commerce and trade, the actual social order, in this 
most democratic of countries, is a hateful and pernicious aristo- 



10 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

cratic. order, — pregnant with injustice and suffering— not in prin- 
ciple nor law, but in fact. We are apt to imagine in our over- 
weening vanity that we have left behind us the odious distinctions 
that prevailed among our ancestors. We sometimes pride our- 
selves upon the equality of condition and happiness that marks 
the society of the United States; and to a certain extent this pride 
is just. Yet it is only to a certain extent. Theoretically, consti- 
tutionally, legally, there are no privileged classes in this nation ; 
the odious laws of caste are annulled. But, practically, posi- 
tively, really, we still live under a regime of caste, we are still 
governed by classes, all our social helps and appliances are still 
distinguishing, partial and confined to the few. It i& not so much 
our legislation, though that is somewhat to blame; it is not the 
law, it is not political principle* that erects barriers between the 
different categories of the American people, — it is our economical 
arrangements, or to speak more accurately, our complete want of 
social and industrial organization. Let this be noted ! 

§ V. — THE RAPID FORMATION OF A NEW FEUDALISM, — THE 
COLLECTIVE SERVITUDE OF LABOR. 

A striking phenomenon is beginning to show itself in these 
days, even to the eyes of those least observant of such things. 
We refer to the rapid and powerful constitution of a new Aristoc- 
racy, of a commercial and financial Feudality, which is taking 
the place of the ancient aristocracy of nobles and warriors, by 
the annihilation and impoverishment of the lower and middling 
classes. # 

After the grand explosions of the American and French Revo- 
lutions, after the overturn of the ancient political system, after the 
abolition of feudal property, of laws of primogeniture, of trading 
guilds and commercial corporations, and the bold proclamation of 
the great doctrine of free-trade, society has believed itself forever 
emancipated from the domination of aristocratic and exclusive 
powers. It has supposed that it had achieved the enfranchise- 
ment of every individual, that it had bequeathed to the universal 
race of man the opportunity for a full development of all its 
faculties. 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 11 

There never was a greater mistake, as the result most abund- 
antly proves. 

An essential element in the calculation has been overlooked. 
Now that the agitation caused by the first onset of destruction has 
somewhat subsided, when matters begin to assume their regular 
places, it is found that individuals indeed enter upon the new race 
of life, with perfect freedom to use themselves and their natural 
powers as they please ; but upon what very different conditions 
have they entered ? They are free to run the same race, but on 
most unequal and disadvantageous terms. The same course is 
open to all, but each one, to continue our sporting metaphor, carries 
different weights. Nay, they cannot be said to have been started 
at the same starting- place. Some were already provided with 
facilities to carry them swiftly and surely along their way, — they 
had fortune, talents, education, high and influential positions, 
—and the accumulated experience of ages ; others, and these are 
the most numerous, had none of these things; they had, nor for- 
tune, nor rank, nor talents developed by anterior education, none 
of the aids and spurs by which the more favored rise ; they are 
banished to the outer borders of civilized existence, they welter in 
the lowest pools of corrupt and stagnant companionships. 

What must result in such a state of things, from that industrial 
liberty on which we reckoned so much — from that famous doc- 
trine of free-trade, which was the peculiar glory of the new 
science of political economy, and which we fondly thought the 
last best expression of the democratic theory ? What result ? Let 
facts answer the question ! They will point us to the general 
subjection of the masses — of the class without wealth, talent or 
education — to the class which is well-provisioned and equipped \ 

"The lists are open," say you, "all men are called to the 
combat, the terms are equal for all capacities." Hold ! you have 
forgotten one thing ! It is, that on this great field of battle, some 
are trained, disciplined, caparisoned, armed to the teeth an im- 
penetrable hauberk and shield is round their bodies, swords and 
spears are in their hands — and they hold the advantageous places 
for assault or for flight; while others, despoiled, naked, ignorant, 
famished, are compelled to live from day to day, and support their 
wives and children, on the meagre pittance extorted from their 



12 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

adversaries or picked by piecemeals from the streets. Oh ! most 
benevolent free-trader, what sort of equality is this ? What fight, 
what resistance even, are we of the many-headed multitude to 
make? Your absolute liberty is only an absolute abandonment 
of the unarmed and destitute masses to the charity of the well-fed 
and well-armed few. Your democratic civ : lization, which began 
in aristocratic feudalism — the progress of which has emancipated 
the working-classes from direct and personal servitude only — will 
end in a moneyed aristocracy will lead to a collective and indirect 
servitude just as oppressive as that from which we have been so 
lately relieved. "Gurth," says Mr. Carlyle, "born-thrall of' 
Cedric, the Saxon, has been greatly pitied by Dryasdust and 
others. Gurth with a brass collar round his neck tending Cedric's 
pigs, in the glades of the wood, is not what I call an exemplar 
of human felicity; but Gurth, with the sky above him, with the 
free air and tinted boscage and umbrage around him, and in him 
the ce*rtainty of lodging and supper when he came home, — Gurth 
to me seems happy in comparison with many a Lancashire and 
Bucking hamshi ire man of these days, not born-thrall of anybody ! 
Gurth's brass collar did not gall iiim ; Cedric deserved to be his 
Master. The pigs were Cedric's, but Gurth too would get his 
parings of them. Gurth had the inexpressible satisfaction of 
feeling himself related indubitably, though in a rude brass-collar 
way, to his fellow-mortals on this earth. He had superiors, 
inferiors, or equals. Gurth is now "emancipated" long since; 
has what we call " liberty." Liberty, I am told, is a divine thing. 
Liberty when it becomes the liberty to die by starvation is not so 
divine." There is much in that fact. Mr. Carlyle ! 

§ VI. — THE CONDITION OF THE LABORER DETERIORATING, 
THROUGH THE DEPRECIATION OF WAGES, &C. 

But while this incoherence of trade, of which we have spoken, has 
tended and is tending to subject the workman to the capitalist, 
the proletaire possessing nothing to the patrician possessing all 
things, let us consider that it has at the same time awakened a 
most disastrous competition among workmen themselves. It is 
setting proletaire against proletaire in an almost deadly industrial 
war. Where laborers abound, which is everywhere, the neces- 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 



13 



sities of existence, under any system of competition, compel them 
when they go forth each morning in the pursuit of employment 
and a master, to lower their wages to the lowest possible sum. 
The rate of wages, in other words, everywhere tends to be re- 
duced to the lowest possible sum consistent with the mere con- 
tinuance of the laborer in life. This, when it is thought of, is an 
awful statement,— but it is not exclusively our own. We find it 
taught in the leading political economists of the day as one of 
their fundamental doctrines. " The wages of simple labor, 5 ' says 
Say, "seldom rise in any country much above what is absolutely 
necessary to subsistence! the quantum of supply always remains 
on a level with the demand ; nay, often goes beyond it." In 
Adam Smith, in McCullough, in Malthus, in Way land, there are 
a "multitude of passages to the same effect. Well, what is the 
obvious inference from such a statement ? Why, that the least 
fluctuation in the demand for labor must inevitably doom a large 
portion of laborers to starvation — to death ! These very writers 
are cold-blooded enough to state that inference. " Where labor- 
ers," says McCullough in his dainty language, "where laborers 
are already subsisting, as in Ireland" (and he might have added 
other countries) "on the lowest species of food, it is of course 
impossible for them to go to a lower in a period of scarcity, and 
should their wages sustain any serious decline, an increase would 
necessarily take place in the rate of mortality." What a coldly 
dignified and stately way of telling us that thousands of fellow- 
beings would die by a most painful and lingering death ! The 
rate of mortality would increase, says the philosopher, with as 
much sangfroid as the surgeon amputates a limb, heedless of the 
agonies of his victim ! At the same time a brother philosopher, 
Monsieur Say, tells us, but with more feeling, that wages are 
liable to "most calamitous oscillations." "War or legislative 

S^ohibition" he continues, "will sometimes suddenly extinguish 
le demand for a particular product, and reduce the industry em- 
ployed upon it to a state of utter destitution." "The mere caprice 
of fashion," says another, the famous Malthus, "is often fatal to 
whole classes. The substitution of shoe-ribbons for buckles was 
a severe blow to the population of Birmingham and Sheffield." 
Indeed, the whole of Malthus's celebrated doctrine of population, 
viz: that the increase of laborers outruns that of the means of 



14 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

subsistence, and that therefore, wars, pestilences, famines, storms, 
that depopulate whole kingdoms, and the direst afflictions of 
mankind, are beneficial — is founded on the melancholy fact in 
the condition of the working classes on which we are dwelling. 
We might, were not the fact itself most glaring in every nation, 
fill a volume with corroborative citations from the essays of the 
political economists. On one side, we see competition among 
laborers reducing the wages on which they and their dependent 
families must subsist; on the other, we see competition among 
employers, forcing them, how great soever may be their generos- 
ity, to yield only the lowest rates of pay, (since no employer, 
without running the risk of certain ruin, could afford to pay his 
workmen higher wages than what was paid by his competitors;) 
and thus the detestable maxims of our modern economy break all 
the laws of justice and humanity. Free-trade, by which we here 
mean competition without organization, is distinguished by the 
execrable mark, that it always and everywhere tends to the reduc- 
tion of wages. After plunging the toiling masses into the gulf of 
misery, it grinds them with a weight that is forever growing 
heavier. In Ireland, in England, in Belgium, in Italy, in France, 
in our own country, wherever competition reigns, where nothing 
arrests the action of a disorganized and incoherent industrialism, 
the working classes are inevitably becoming more miserable and 
more abject. They not only work against each other, but agains* 
machines that cost nothing, yet dispense with the labor of an 
hundred men.* 

We state this not as an opinion of our own — not as a logical 
deduction from premises existing in our own minds, — but as a fact, 
proven by statistics, declared by official recorns, and confirmed by 
innumeraole observations made by missionaries of benevolence 
and' en lightened and liberal statesmen. What means that signi- 
ficant dispute that has put the more recent of political philoso- 
phers on the continent, at loggerheads ? Whence the awful fact* 
that in the midst of an increase of general riches, the condition of 
the laboring classes is growing worse,— a fact in the solution of 
which they are all so much puzzled ? Sismondi, one of the most 
brilliant successors of Jean Baptiste Say, though of another schools 

* The question of the influence of labor saving machines is a great 
one, which we may hereafter undertake to discuss. 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 15 

was so painfully impressed with this fact, that his whole work 
may be considered as a prolonged wail over the miseries of the 
workinar-classes. " His cry of alarm," says the distinguished 
professor of political economy at the University of Pans, M. 
Blanqui, "has been solemnly and eloquently repeated ; it is re- 
echoed by whole populations in manufacturing cities, amid the 
tumult of insurrection." Again, says the same able and profound 
writer, in criticising Adam Smith, "Why is wealth so unequally 
distributed in society ? Why are there so many starving beings 
in. civilized nations? What is the natuial relation between popu- 
lation and subsistence ? Why does misery increase amongst the 
laboring classes in proportion to the increase of wealth in the 
nation ?" Again he says, " This doctrine," the doctrine $f Adam 
Smith, that private interest left entirely to its own management, 
will always direct capital to those channels which are best adapt- 
ed to public welfare, "this doctrine, which has prevailed in Eng- 
land and given most extraordinary impulse to industry, has com- 
menced nevertheless to produce the most alarming effects; it has 
produced unbounded wealth among capitalists and wretched pov- 
erty among the lower classes; it has enriched the nation, but at 
the cruel expense of industry." To the same effect M. Rossi, 
professor of political economy in the College of France, and a 
learned writer regarded by Guizot as " the wisest representative 
of the science," in an introductory discourse remarked, "A great 
problem occupies all minds; it is the coexistence of two seemingly 
conflicting facts; on the one hand, a general increase of national 
wealth ; on the other hand, growing misery and distress among 
the greater part of workmen. A solution has been demanded of 
political economy, but it has not yet been found. This solution, 
when it shall have been made,- will be the greatest social discov- 
ery of the day." If we were in a position to consult authorities, 
we could cite many more confirming paragraphs of the same 
nature. But Heaven knows, that we have written enough on 
this head. Our hearts begin to sicken with the details which our 
inquiry forces upon us ! 

§ VII. — REDUCTION OF THE MIDDLING CLASSES. 

Alas ! this is not all ; the evil is not merely confined to the 
lowest classes of laborers. Analogous symptoms are showing 



36 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

themselves among the possessors of small means — among mas- 
ter mechanics and farmers. If the first effect of our monstrous 
modern system of competition — competition, we mean, on condi- 
tions so unequal, — has been the. subjection of the workmen, its 
second effect will be the progressive ruin of the poorer class ol 
employers. Small properties — master-mechanics on a small scale 
— inferior branches of commerce and art — are destined to be 
crushed under the gigantic weight, the colossal wheels of larger 
properties and enterprises. We may see this tendency of things 
even in this country, where the possession of inexhaustible tracts 
of land gives so fine an opportunity to the individual to resist the 
tendencies of society. Already, in almost every branch of indus- 
try, gr#at cap'tals, great enterprises give the law to the smaller. 
Steam, machinery, large manufactories are everywhere supplant- 
ing the meaner kind of workshops. Employers are sinking; into 
the class of the employed, .which only renders the supply of 
work the more uncertain and less in amount to the latter class- 
Out cities are vast commercial vortices that are drawing the 
whole country within their fatal circle. Commerce, which should 
be the dependent handmaid of Agriculture and Manufactures, has 
become their absolute master. It rules the world with the omni- 
potence of a despot. It makes all industry, and art, and science 
its tributaries. It is a vast insatiable parasite sucking the life-sap 
of Production. It is a monstrous vampire that preys with re- 
morseless appetite upon the energies of nations. It absorbs all 
property, in regulating values by means of its banks ; it concen- 
trates wealth in the hands of a few men in a few central places; 
it is the source of innumerable frauds, fluctuations, bankruptcies 
and commercial crises; and it is fast laying its hand upon the 
land, by means of agricultural -loaning companies, — and upon 
government, by means of national debt.* 

Now, Commerce, be it remembered, is the legitimate offspring 
of our competitive system of industry. 

* We pass hurriedly over Commerce^ because we intend giving it a 
full criticism hereafter. 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY*. 17 

§ VIII. — DIVISION OF SOCIETY INTO TWO CLASSES ONE, POS- 
SESSING ALL — THE OTHER, NOTHING 

Thus, in spite of the abstractly democratic principle of industrial 
freedom, or rather in consequence of that freedom, (false and illu- 
sory as all simple unorganized liberty must be,) capital gravitates 
around capital in proportion to its mass, and is gathered into the 
hands of a iew of the wealthiest men. Society tends to a division, 
more and more distinct, into two classes, — a small number possess- 
ing everything, or next to everything, absolute masters of the 
entire field of property, commerce and art, — and the great mass, 
possessing nothing, living in a forced dependence on the owners 
of capital and of the instruments of labor, and compelled for a 
precarious and decreasing return to hire out their muscles, their 
skill, and their time to their new feudal lords. 

This is no dream ; it is no prophecy ; it is a piece of contempo- 
raneous history. We are advancing with rapid strides, we repeat, 
toward the constitution of a new aristocracy,— one as odious as 
it is ignoble — one which, unconsecrated by hereditary remem- 
brances or actual deeds of valor, derives its only distinction from 
the ineradicable baseness and tenacity of its love of money. The 
fa,ct characterizes our whole modern civilization. It is a pheno- 
menon, not peculiar to any one civilized nation, but which is 
developed in every State in a degree corresponding to the advance- 
ment of its industry. It follows, step by step, in the tracks of 
commerce and manufactures. Great Britain presents the most 
signal example of the concentration of capital in the hands of a 
iew, but the awful contrasts of her social condition are fast being 
rivalled by Belgium and France. Our own country abounds in 
the symptoms of the disease. Already the mere commercial de- 
pendents of England, we begin to exhibit traces of her vicious and 
coirupting spirit of aristocracy. Commerce is the controlling power 
in the country. It is enslaving every other branch of business. 
It is making every class of men its subsidiary. One of our most 
sagacious statesmen, Mr. Benton, long since had the sagacity to 
perceive this, although he did not have wisdom enough at the 
same time to discover the reasons of it, nor the remedy. Our po- 
litical battle, said he, is a battle between Man and Money. The 



18 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

Republican party caught up the saying, and has struggled despe- 
rately to resist the stream of moneyed influences that is bearing it 
onward to death. But, not knowing why nor wherefore, it has 
struggled blindly ; the very means of reform which it often pro- 
posed, if carried out, would only have exaggerated the evil. It 
was not the Whis; policy that was so much in the wrong; it was 
not because the law sanctioned banks that they suifered ; it was 
not protective tariffs nor internal improvements that provoked the 
curse. These were bad enough ; but lying back of them was a 
cause which was vastly more pernicious than either of them or 
all. For they all had their origin in the unorganized state ot 
industry. To have repealed all monopolies, to have unloosed 
exclusive laws, to have given free scope to the existing energies 
of trade, in the want of such organization, would have aggravated 
the disorders of society. It could only have made the rich richer 
and the poor poorer. It would have accelerated the formation of 
that Aristocracy of Wealth which we are deploring, and against 
which so fierce a war has been justly but blindly waged for ten 
years. 

§ IX. — THE INFEUDATION OF GOVERNMENT. 

Yet the fact that the laws are made to sanction and' sustain the 
overgrown monopolies of trade, is one of the most melancholy 
evidences of the extent to which the new feudality has advanced. 
So strong is it, that it is even strong enough, at this early period 
in its career, to grapple and overcome the strongest governments 
on earth. To what point soever in the civilized world we turn 
our eyes, we see that the Money Power is mightier than the 
Legislative Power. No matter what the form of the government, 
it is compelled to strike its colors before this formidable enemy. 
Monarchs, aristocrats, and republicans have alike fallen victims 
to the huge Juggernaut of Money. On the continent of Europe, 
we are told by good authority, that the canal and railway compa- 
nies often rise in resistance of the designs of the government. 
But it is in this nation, where there are fewer restraints upon the 
indolence of the money power, (for the very reason that it is more 
democratic than any other,) that its manifestations have grown to 
an oppressive and overshadowing enormity. To such a height 
has its unbridled audacity been carried, that we can hardly find 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 19 

language in which to describe the excess of its evils. Our gene- 
ral government, as well the governments of every individual 
state, has been made to succumb to its influences. What has 
been the aspect of our legislation for the last twenty years, nay, 
ever since the origin of the nation ? Has it not been one unceas- 
ing struggle on the part of the possessors of wealth, either to 
secure past immunities, or to acquire additional privileges ? Have 
not our legislative bodies been beset, day after day, and year after 
year, by the insinuating arts of the applicants for exclusive char- 
ters of all kinds? Has not the invention of selfishness been ex- 
hausted in devising schemes for robbing the mass for the sake of 
the few? What plans have been left unbroached, — what iniqui- 
ties untried ? Banks to be controlled by the few ; tariffs operating 
solely for the benefit of the few; private enterprises to be paid 
for out of the public purse ; hypothecations of national stock in 
behalf of individuals or corporations; the borrowing of money to 
carry on works of partial or local character ; these have constitu- 
ted the staple topics of our legislative discussions. Our states, 
which in their origin were christened, and which we still call, 
Independent Sovereignties, have degenerated into menial train- 
bearers to stock-jobbing merchants and fraudulent speculators. All 
their pride and dignity have been sacrificed to the selfish whims 
of the Mammonites. Their infeudation is well-nigh complete. 
They are becoming, and in many respects, have become the vile, 
miserable vassals of their superiors, — the Money- Lords; bound 
hand and foot by the heavy chains of debt, and sold, body and 
soul, to the capitalists, either at home or abroad, who ar^ their 
owners and masters. Bankrupt in purse; bankrupt, many of 
them, in honor; their future time and labor, their very sinews 
and muscles, are alienated and pledged. Was there ever a serf, a 
vassal, a slave less free ? Oh ! it was no irony that which dubbed 
our knights of the bank-counter, with the title of Rag-Barons; or 
rather it was the keen and biting irony of strict truth ! Nor was 
it a mere far-fetched party ruse to liken the famous Nicholas of 
the Bank to the autocrat Nicholas of Russia. He was one of the 
mightiest of autocrats, and the name stuck because it fit. No 
despots in the old world wield a more tyrannic power than the 
despots of our commercial system ; there are none whose commands 
are more imperatively issued, or more speedily or more slavishly 



20 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

executed. The waive of a small metallic wand in Threadneedle 
street, London, will send an electric shock to the remotest corners 
of the globe. A handful of men, gathered in a back parlor of 
the Bank of England, paralyze the industry of millions, living 
thousands of miles off, and for a half century to come. Was 
there ever monarch who could do as much as this ? 

We well remember reading, a few years since, in one of the 
most respectable organs of the Democratic part)^* an article on 
the identity of the modern banking and the ancient feudal systems. 
It was a convincing demonstration of the likeness. It showed a 
close resemblance in every feature of the two systems, only that 
it made the banking system the ugliest. Yet what has that party- 
done, or what can it do, to alter the fact ? 

§ X. — DANGER OF SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS. 

A condition of things such as we have been describing, cannot 
long continue. Universal monopoly cannot, in the age in which 
we live, be endured by the oppressed and suffering working 
classes. The notion of individual and equal rights which has 
fastened itself so deeply in the minds of men within the last few 
centuries, will prompt the people to rise against the institutions 
to which they ascribe the existence of this frightful evil. The 
growing hatred of the poor for the rich — a hatred which it is use- 
less to deny — will every day grow more intense. Already among 
the chartists of England, a " black mutinous discontent," a hot 
feverish hatred of the wealthy is springing up. They are getting rest- 
less under their long discipline of a thin diet and hard labor. A notion 
is fermenting in their brains that society is bound to do more for 
them than to provide dusky poor-houses and bastiles. It will be a 
terrific explosion this fermenting notion will make, unless the 
weight of their superincumbent misery be removed. Let it be 
looked to in time. 

Human beings are not mere commodities, whose price augments 
and diminishes with the supply in the market. Society owes 
them a guaranty of life and work. They possess a right to labor, 
which is the most sacred of all rights. Labor is their property ; 
the highest form and source of all property. They have intel- 

* The Democratic Review. 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 21 

lectual and moral faculties which must be developed. God has 
placed them on the earth, to advance. What shall they do, then, 
with that society, which not only prevents them from advancing, 
bat which degrades and brutifies them into natures worse than 
those of beasts ? We say worse than beasts, because to the stu- 
pidity and unreasoning violence of animals, they often add the 
malignity of demons. 

§ XT. — THE SOCIAL HELL. 

Thus we have stated that blind competition tends to the forma- 
tion of gigantic monopolies in every branch of labor ; that it de- 
preciates the wages of the working classes ; that it excites an 
endless warfare between human arms, and machinery and capital, 
— a war m which the weak succumb ; that it renders the recur- 
rence of failures, bankruptcies, and commercial crises a sort of 
endemic disease; and that it reduces the middling and lower classes 
to a precarious and miserable existence. We have stated, on the 
authority of authentic documents, that while the few rich are 
becoming more and more rich, the unnumbered many are becoming 
poorer. Is anything further necessary to prove that our modern 
world of industry is a veritable hell, where disorder, discord, 
and wretchedness reign, and in which the most cruel fables of the 
old mythology are more than realized ? The masses — naked and 
destitute, yet surrounded by a prodigality of wealth ; seeing on all 
sides heaps of gold, which by a fatal decree they cannot reach; 
stunned by the noise of gilded equipages, or dazzled by the bril- 
liance of splendid draperies and dresses ; their appetites excited by 
the magnificence of heaped-up luxuries of every climate and all 
arts ; provoked by all that can gratify desire, yet unable to touch 
one jot or tittle of it — offer a terrible exemplification of Tantalus, 
tormented by an eternal hunger and thirst after fruits and waters, 
always within his reach, yet perpetually eluding his grasp. Was 
the penalty of Sisyphus condemned to roll his stone to a summit, 
from which it was forever falling, more poignant than that of 
many fathers of families, among the poorer classes, w T ho, after 
laboring to exhaustion during their w T hole lives, to amass some- 
what for their old age or for their children, see it swallowed up in 
one of those periodical crises of failure and ruin which are the 
inevitable attendants of our methods of loose competition ? Or 






22 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

the story of the Danaides, compelled incessantly to draw water in 
vessels from which it incessantly escaped, does it not with a fear- 
ful fidelity symbolize the implacable fate of nearly two- thirds of 
our modern societies, who draw from the bosom of the earth and 
the workshops of production, by unrelaxing toil, floods of wealth, 
that always slip through their hands, to be collected in the vast 
reservoirs of a moneyed aristocracy ? Walk through the streets of 
any of our crowded cities; see how within stone's throw of each 
other stand the most marked and frightful contrasts ! Here, look at 
this marble palace reared in a pure atmosphere and in the neigh- 
borhood of pleasing prospects. Its interior is adorned with every 
refinement that the accumulated skill of sixty centuries has been 
able to invent; velvet carpets, downy cushions, gorgeous tapes- 
tries, stoves, musical instruments, pictures, statues and books. 
For the gratification and development of its owner and his family, 
industry, science, and art have been tasked to their utmost capacity 
of production. They bathe in all the delights, sensuous and in- 
tellectual, that human existence at this period of its caieer can 
furnish. They feel no cares; they know no interruption to the 
unceasing round of their enjoyments. Look you, again, to that 
not far distant alley, where some ten diseased, destitute and de- 
praved families are nestled under the same rickety and tumbling 
roof; no fire is there to warm them; no clothes to cover their 
bodies ; a pool of filth sends up its nauseousness perhaps in the 
very midst of their dwelling; the rain and keen hail fall on their 
almost defenceless heads; the pestilence is forever hovering over 
their door-posts; their minds are blacker than night with the 
black mists of ignorance ; and their hearts are torn with fierce 
lusts and passions ; the very sun-light blotted from the firmament 
and life itself turned into a protracted and bitter curse ! Look 
you, at this, we say, and think that unless something better than 
what we now see is done, it will all grow worse ! Oh heaven ; 
it is an oppressive, a heart-rending thought ! How well has one 
of our noble young poets uttered : 

I do not mourn my friends are false, 

I dare not grieve for sins of mine, 
I weep for those who pine to death, 

Great God ! in this rich world of thine ! 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 23 

So many trees there are to see, 
And fields go waving broad with grain, 

And yet, what utter misery, 
Our very brothers lie in pain. 

These by th^ir darkened hearthstones sit, 
Their children shivering idly round; 

As true as liveth God, 'twere fit, 
For these poor men, to curse the ground. 

And those who daily bread have none, 
Half-starved the long, long winter's day, 

Fond parents gazing on their young, 
Too wholly sad, one word to say. 

To them, it seems, their God has cursed, 

This race of ours, since they were bom; 
Willing to toil, and yet deprived 
Of common wood or store of corn 

I do not weep for my own woes, 

They are as nothing in my eye ; 
I weep for them, who starved and froze, 

Do curse their God, and long to die. 

§ XII. — SOMETHING TO BE DONE — AND WHAT ? 

What, then, in a world like this, is to be done? The question 
of questions is this! Either we are to close the shells of our 
selfishness around us, sinking down into the mire, with stupid 
indifference, or we are to address ourselves, at once, like noble 
and true-hearted men, to the solution of the difficulty. The fact 
of human misery is a broad and glaring one, written in characters 
of fire and blood across the whole earth. What is to be done 
with it ? We iterate the question. 

1. We remark that little or nothing is to be done by any form 
of political action, that we know of, using the word political only 
in its common application to the movements of government. And 
there are two reasons for this ; first, that politics have accomplished 
all that it is required of them to accomplish ; and second, that their 
spnere is so limited, that they cannot be made to touch the source 
of the evil. We wish to say nothing here against any of our 
great political parties; but we do assert that the doctrines of either 
of them, earned out to the hearts' content of the most sanguine 
advocates of them, would achieve nothing in the way of social 



24 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

reform. The Whigs, by the system they propose, would only 
consecrate by Jaw those abuses and distinctions which are the 
evidence and result of our rapid tendency to a commercial feudal- 
ity. On the other hand, the Democrats, by the repeal of all 
restraining laws, would only give a broader field for the freer 
development of the elements of disorder — they would only deepen 
and widen the breaches in society opened by the operation of the 
principle of unlimited competition. The truth is, that there is 
everywhere spreading a secret dissatisfaction with the results of 
our political contests. Among our best minds, there has long 
been a conviction that the strife of politics was an utterly inane 
and useless one, fit only, like the bull -baitings and carnivals of 
older nations, to amuse the coarser tastes of the populace ; while 
the people themselves are conscious of a growing indifference to 
the magniloquent appeals of statesmen and editors. It is now 
more than half a century since the controversies of our politics 
begun, and it would require the sharpest optics to discover in 
what particular they had advanced. There has been infinite labor 
with no progress. The same questions have been argued and 
reargued, without coming to a decision. We have heard speech 
after speech ; we have seen election after election ; the bar-rooms 
have resounded with appeals ; the streets have reechoed with 
clamorings; now this faction has triumphed, and now that; vic- 
tory and defeat have alternated more swiftly than the changes of 
the moon ; legislatures and senates have met, and Presidents have 
fulminated ; yet it does not appear, after all this noise and com- 
motion — after all this everlast ; ng talk and expense, that we are at 
all nearer to a conclusion, in these days of John Tyler, than we 
were in the days of Thomas Jefferson, If any one would be im- 
pressed with this view, let him compare the daily newspapers of 
the two epochs; he will find that with the change of a few names 
and dates, the articles of one might well answer for the pages of 
the other. Our long discussion seems to have been afflicted with 
the curse of perpetual barrenness. This protracted struggle, this 
ever renewed debate, has resulted, when ail is told, to the net 
quotient — zero. 

But let us not be understood as saying that there has been no 
progress in American society. God forbid ' How could we say 
it, when we know that the mighty muscles of the human hand, 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 25 

the mighty powers of the human mind and heart, have been at 
work ? How could we say it, when giant miraculous Labor has 
been felling the forests, and turning the giebe, and whirling the spin- 
ning jennies, and putting down its thoughts in words and deeds; 
when the spires of an hundred thousand school -houses point to 
the skies ; when the fires of truth and self-sacrifice have glowed 
in many more thousand breasts ; when the noblest aspirations were 
ascending from millions of noble souls? Yes, we thank God, 
there has been progress : but it. has not been by means of, so much 
a3 in spite of, our politics. We mean that our politics has never 
been thorough enough to touch the root of our social distress. It 
has now no vitality. All the sap has dried out and withered from 
our discussions. The old straw has been thrashed and rethrashed 
until it is reduced to the merest impalpable powder — out of which 
nothing can be made, not even smiff strong enough to tickle a 
grown man's nostrils. Something deeper — more searching, more 
comprehensive, more true — is wanting, to raise us from the 
slough into which we have lamentably fallen. 

2. Our help, if any is to come to us, is to be found in the better 
adjustment of our social relations. The vice for which we seek a 
remedy is in the heart of society, not its extremities; and it is to 
the heart that we must apply the cure. What that cure may be, 
is partly indicated by the whole tenor of this essay. We have 
shown that capital and labor are at open war. The field of in- 
dustry, in all its branches, is an eternal field of battle. Either 
capital tyrannizes over labor, or labor, driven to extremes, rises 
in insurrection against its oppressor. One or the other of these 
effects inevitably follow the working of the system of unrestrained 
competition. How obvious the suggestion, then, that this com- 
petition must be brought to an end? If we can introduce peace, 
where there was before war — if we can make a common feelin°- 
where there was before antagonism and hatred — if we can discover 
a mode of causing men to work for each other instead of against 
each other — then, we say, we have advanced a most important 
step toward the solution of the problem. 

Now, the power which is able to effect this change, which can 
turn opposition into accord, divergence into convergence, contest 
into cooperation, is the principle of the organization of indus- 
try ON THE BASIS OF A UNION OF INTERESTS. 

2 



26 CONSTRUCTIVE: AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

§ XIII. — UNITY OF INTERESTS. 

The three productive elements of society, the three sources of 
its wealth, the three wheels of industrial mechanism, are Capital, 
Labor, and Talent. Is it not conceivable that these three powers 
could he wisely combined so as to be made to work together, that 
these three wheels could te made to roll into each other with a 
beautiful harmony? Can we not suppose that for the anarchical 
strife of blind competition ; that for the war of capital against 
capital, labor against labor, workman against workman and against 
machinery ; that, for general disorder, the universal shock of pro- 
ductive forces, and the. destruction of values in so many contrary 
movements, might be substituted the productive combination and 
useful employment of all these forces ? Most assuredly such an 
arrangement can be supposed ; and why not accomplished ? At 
any rate, does it not become our first and most imperative duty to 
seek out the conditions of industrial reconciliation and peace ? 

There is no radical antagonism in the nature of these things; there 
is no eternal and necessary repulsion between the various elements 
of production. The frightful combats of capital against capital, 
of capital against labor and talent, of laborer against laborer, of 
masters against workmen and workmen against masters, of each 
against all and all against each, is not a remorseless and inexo- 
rable condition of the life of humanity. They pertain only to the 
actual mechanism of industry, to the system of chaotic and un- 
regulated competition, to that false liberty of whose triumphs we 
have boasted with such hollow and ill-timed joy. A better and truer 
mechanism, a nobler organic liberty, to which these aw T ful evils 
do not adhere, can be found. The wisdom of man is able to dis- 
cover, if it has not already under God discovered, an outlet to this 
labyrinth of suffering — a pathway upward from this dark, disor- 
dered, howling abyss. 

This is what we mean by true democracy — a state in which 
the highest rights and interests of man shall be the means and 
appliances of a full development; and this Democracy, construct- 
ive and pacific in its character, becomes the object for which every 
benevolent and conscientious man should labor. How far we 
have already advanced toward the realization of it, and what yet 
remains to be done, shall be our topic in some future inquiry. 
Meanwhile, look to it, ye people ! 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 27 



PART II. 



In the first part of this Essay, we came to the conclusion, that 
the only remedy for the existing distresses of society, and particu- 
larly of the working; classes, could be found in some plan for the 
uniting of material interests. We said, that it was possible for 
the intellect of man to devise means by which Labor, Capital, and 
Talent should be made to work together and for each other, in- 
stead of against each other, and through which every man would 
labor for himself while laboring for his neighbor. But thus far, 
our argument has been mostly critical ; we shall now attempt to 
make it constructive. 



§ I. — ORGANIZATION. 

• 

One fact, as much as any other, strikes us, when we consider 
the material creation of God. It is, that this whole universe is 
made according to a law of organization ; that there is nothing in 
it incoherent or at loose-ends ; that from the planet to the plant ? 
from the stars which are the suns of worlds of unimaginable mag- 
nitude, to the insect whose body is three million times less than a 
visible point, amid the endless variety of forms and existences 
that link by link supply the interval, there is an organic law per- 
vading the whole. Beginning with tb* rude masses of the mine- 
ral kingdom, which seem like mere accidc-r.tal conglomerations — 
the primitive elements out of which the higher kingdoms are to 
grow — we soon see in its tendency to crystallization, the mute 



28 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

faint prophecies of the more definite organization of vegetable na- 
ture^ At the summit of the vegetable series, we again discover 
the outlines of the more intricate and finished structure of animals. 
While in man, the crown and chief of the material world, we be- 
hold the consummation of an organism, perfect in all its parts, and 
perfect as a whole. It would be delightful to inquire into this law 
of organization, and to show how, by the organic series, the Crea- 
tor has distributed the harmonies of the universe; but it is suffi- 
cient for our present purpose, to point out its existence. This im- 
mutable and eternal fact, is impressed on all we see, that nothing 
is perfect w T hich is not organized. 

§ II. — MORAL ORGANIZATION. 

Men appear to have been aware of this law, in the efforts which 
they have made to carry into effect their various religious, litera- 
ry, and social projects. At least, we infer so from a superficial 
reading of their history, from the earliest time down to the pres- 
ent moment Nearly all the controversies which have shaken 
the world, have related to the question, as to what was the best 
mode in which men could organize themselves, either as a State 
or a Church. The question of government, which has been the 
bone of contention at all times and with every people, resolves it- 
self into a question of organization — that is, how the political re- 
lations of mankind can be best adjusted into a system, which 
would give the largest liberty to the individual, and, at the same time, 
preserve the unity and strength of the community. The question 
of the outwaitfl establishment of the Church has been a mere ques- 
tion as to, the right method of organizing the spiritual relations of 
priests and people: and indeed, nearly all the enterprises that men 
undertake, seem to centre and end in an effort after a more com- 
plete organization. When a man. a sect, or a party have any new 
idea to propagate, it is common to begin by organizing some body 
which is charged with the task. Or we might rathei say, that 
the very existence of sects and parties is a proof of the strong ten- 
dency of the human mind toward combination and organic effort. 
Thus, we have armies, instituted for works of destruction, which 
do their work most effectually ; we have missionary societies, 
which send their agents to the remotest regions of the earth, re- 
gardless of tropic heats or arctic colds ; we have academies of 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 20 

music in which are developed concords of sound the most grand 
and the most melting ; we have institutes of learning, where the 
accumulated literature and science of three thousand years are 
made available to any capacity ; we have Bible and tract societies 
that scatter religious truth like seed on the wings of the wind ; 
we have trading and banking corporations, that lay the wealth of 
the world under tribute, and heap up for their projectors vast un- 
told treasures; in short, on all hands, we see the giant miraculous 
effects of systematic and regulated co-operation. Yet these in- 
strumentalities are meagre and incomplete developments — mere 
aggregations of men, like the simple cohering particles of rude 
matter — hardly approaching a formal organization, yet demon- 
strating, with resistless force, how great would be the vigor of a 
true and living organism ! For if such things are done in the 
green tree, what shall be done in the dry ? 

§ III. — INDUSTRY ALONE WITHOUT A PLAN. 

And here we are struck with a notable anomaly in the midst of 
all these arrangements. It is, that while men have resorted to as- 
sociated effort in the execution of almost every kind of enterprise, 
it has never occurred to them to organize the human forces, the 
vital energies by which aloi;eall useful results are brought about. 
We mean that it is a strange oversight in the possessors of these 
forces that they have never thought of combining them for their 
own benefit. It is true, that military leaders, that governors of 
states, that capitalists and speculators, have well known the se- 
cret of the mighty power of united labor, and have availed them- 
selves of its advantages. But the wonder is, that the men of in- 
dustry themselves, have at no time, unless in the most narrow and 
feeble way, arranged that cunningness and strength of muscle, 
which has been their only wealth, which indeed is the only 
source of wealth to mankind, into something like an organization. 
In the sphere of labor alone, has the world remained in the state 
of isolated, incoherent, cut-throat individuality and competitive an- 
tagonism. The simplest forms of mere aggregated effort have 
scarcely been applied to it, save under the domination of some se- 
vere task-master or despot. But why should not industry be o-r 
ganized ? Why should not laborers band together for the accom- 
plishment of their ends ; not as a class merely, not as a political 



30 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

party, not for selfish or temporary purposes, but as the great, col- 
lective, eternal power of Production ? Will any one say that 
such a thing is impossible ? Can any one point out in what re- 
spect industry is incapable of being united and harmonized ? No; 
the impossibility is in continuing it m its present condition of du- 
plicity and discord — inefficient in its movements, at war with it- 
self, monotonous, convulsive, repugnant and dishonorable ! The 
time has arrived, when it must either come to an end in violence, 
or receive into itself a higher law. Now, what that law may be, 
is precisely the question of this epoch ; it is the question on 
which we are engaged ; it is the vital all-important problem, on 
which hangs the fate of our modern societies. We have got so 
far into the future, that we can say boldly, that labor must be or- 
ganized — one way or another, the thing must be done. It is the 
impregnating principle of the coming time. As the personal Christ 
of old, who is our redemption, sprung from the family of the Car- 
penter, so do we most earnestly believe, that his second coming in 
spirit, for the salvation of our poor, decrepit, diseased and wretched 
societies, will be through the family of Labor. 

§ IV. — PRACTICAL EXAMPLES. 

We have said that Industry alone has remained incoherent, but 
we are reminded of one or two instances to the contrary, which 
may be regarded in the light of those exceptions which confirm 
the general truth. We refer now particularly to an exemplifica- 
tion of unity of interests that grew up among the cheese-makers 
of Jura, and a still more remarkable instance discovered by Dr. 
Urquhart, among the Turks of Ambelakia. The former case is 
told us by M. Considerant, of France, who speaks from his own 
knowledge, to this effect. In the mountains of Jura, where the 
climate interdicts the cultivation of the vine and grain, and where 
milk cannot be sold in its pure state owing to the distance from 
the cities, it is converted into cheese. It was the custom not long 
since, in every village of this region, where there were some twen- 
ty or thirty families, owning some two hundred cows, for each 
family to make its cheese for itself, and to send to market for 
itself — thus every day making use of some tweniy or thirty uten- 
sils, some twenty or thirty dairies, and of the labor of some twen- 
ty or thirty men, both in producing the article, and conveying it 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 31 

to market. And in most cases, to say nothing of waste, the 
cheese produced was of an inferior quality; while each family 
coming into competition when they entered the market, was ob- 
liged to sell at the lowest possible price, so that none gained by 
the sales, while the majority were losers. What did these brave 
mountaineers do in these circumstances ? Why, they fell upon 
the very rational principle, that it was not wise in them to be 
picking each others pockets, and would be much better could they 
assist each other as good friends and neighbors. So they hired a 
small house in the centre of the village, composed of two rooms- 
one of which they converted into a shop, and the other into a 
dairy In the shop they erected a huge brass kettle, large enough 
to receive the daily milk product of the two hundred cows, which 
milk was made into cheese by the labor of a single man called the 
fruiterer, without further trouble on the part of its owners. The 
quantity of milk deposited by any family each day was notched 
upon two pieces of wood, one of which was kept by the fruiterer, 
and the other taken by the family ; by which simple method the 
strictest account was kept. When the cheeses were sold, they 
were sold by wholesale, without losses through competition, and 
with a comparatively slight charge for conveyance to market. 
From the general sum received for them was subtracted the rent 
of the house, the price of fuel, instruments, carriage, and of the 
work of the fruiterer, after which the remainder was divided 
among the families of the village, in proportion to the amount of 
milk contributed to the dairy. Thus, with one-thirtieth part of 
the labor, and a thirtieth part of the expense, they w T ere enabled to 
receive a thirty-fold return for their product. This practice be- 
gun in the hamlet of Salines, is now the common custom through 
all the higher provinces of the Alps. It is a simple but most sig- 
nificant illustration of a great truth. 

The other example, for the details of which we must refer to 
Dr. Urquhart's noble work, " The Spirit of the East," is found in 
the commercial municipality of Ambelakia. There, with a pop- 
ulation of four thousand people, all the manufacture and trade 
was carried on according to a joint stock principle — no distinctions 
of interest existing between capitalists and laborers. It grew rapid- 
ly in importance ; its fabrics became so celebrated, as shortly to 
absorb the best markets ; and it annually divided from sixty to 



32 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

one hundred percent, upon all its investments. Thus a weak, 
insignificant hamlet, in what is commonly called one of the most 
despotic of nations, without a single field in its vicinity, with no 
advantage of position, with no local industry, with no commercial 
connection, in the neighborhood of no manufacturing movement, 
neither situated on a navigable river nor on the sea, accessible by 
no road except a goals'-path among precipices, its industry unaid- 
ed by the secrets of chemistry or combinations of mechanical pow~ 
er — did, by the simple fact of a union of interests, and a union of 
sympathies, rise to a degree of outward prosperity and internal 
harmony, unparalleled in the history of commercial enterprise. 
External causes of violence, and the invention of spinning jennies 
in England, contributed to the dispersion of this hive of labor and 
productiveness. 



§ V. — SUGGESTIONS AND PROJECTS. 

Is there any reason why similar combinations should not take 
place among the workmen and capitalists of this day, when indus- 
try is so much more developed, and the facilities of intercourse so 
many and important ? Is it not ihe plainest matter imaginable, 
how immeasurably the laborers of any trade or craft would be the 
garners, if, instead of working against each other as they do now, 
they should contrive to concentrate their energies in obedience to 
some law of mutual interest ? 

We can easily conceive of a variety of modes in which the 
principle of a common interest might be realized. The shoema- 
kers, or any other class of mechanics might, without much diffi- 
culty, form themselves into an union, under discreet and liberal 
laws, for the prosecution of the different branches of their trade. 
With a single large building, somewhere in the centre of trade, 
with a proper distribution of labor, allowing each man a payment 
proportioned to the kind and amount of his work, with the advan- 
tage of having all the departments of the art conducted near to each 
other, with the best tools and materials, buying by wholesale, and 
at all times commanding the markets for its sales — such a league 
would inevitably lead to the fortune of all its members. But the 
advantage of an industrial formation like this would be greatly 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 33 

extended, if the club of shoemakers should be so enlarged as to em- 
brace all the dealers in leather. How much could be saved in house 
rent, fuel, waste of material, loss of time in passing from one 
place or one pursuit to another ? Or take the business of newspa- 
per publishing, as an example of what might be accomplished by 
a right division and combination of employments. Let the edito- 
rial department constitute one group of laborers, the composing 
and printing department another, the publishing and financial de- 
partment another ; and then let each member of the firm be paid 
according to the skill, capital, or labor which he brings to the con- 
cern—think you, that such an enterprise would not soon grow 
into an extensive and wealthy establishment? Next, let there be 
added to it, a department for making paper, and a department for 
casting type, (so that what was before only an aggregation, 
would now become a group,) and its economies would increase 
w'th a corresponding increase of efficiency. Yet a simple group, 
of similar pursuits of this kind, would be nothing compared with a 
series of groups, with all the additional force that would be de- 
rived from the enthusiasm of contact and rivalry. 

Now, it is a series of co-operations that we propose, as the 
means of our social reform. It is not a mere league on the part 
of the followers of a particular calling — it is not a treaty of amity 
between the members of distinct classes — not the promiscuous 
commingling of all branches of trade, that we vindicate; but it is 
the voluntary union of the whole of Humanity, on definite and 
scientific grounds. We contend for the solidarity of the race in 
organic forms ; we desire the universal association of man, ac- 
cording to an universal principle: we aim at the thorough re- 
organization, not of a segment, but of the whole of society, on a 
basis of individual independence and freedom, and collective har- 
mony and progress. 

§ VI. — ORGANIZATION OF THE TOWNSHIP. 

This object can be attained, we think, by the organization of 
the township. Let us suppose, that in a district composed of some 
three hundred families, (about eighteen hundred souls) the inhabi- 
tants should, call a public meeting, to consider their social condi- 
tion, and after the maturest deliberation, should adopt the following 
resolutions : 2* 



34 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

1st. An association is formed between all the inhabitants of this 
township, rich and poor; the capital to be composed of the fixed 
property of all, and of the furniture and goods which each one 
may see fit to contribute, at an appraised valuation. 

2nd. Every associate shall receive in exchange for what he 
brings, a certificate representing the exact value of the capital re- 
linquished to the society. 

3d. Each share shall be a mortgage upon the fixed property 
which it represents, and upon the general property of the Asso- 
ciation. 

4th. Every associate, whether he have contributed fixed pro- 
perty or not, shall be allowed to take part in the productive use 
of the common funds, for the employment of his labor and talent. 

5th. Women and children enter the society on the same terms 
as the men. 

6th. The annual income, the common expenses being first liqui- 
dated, shall be divided among the members on the following 
terms : 

(a) A first portion shall go to pay the interest on stocks. 

(b) A second portion shall be divided among the laborers, ac- 
cording to the difficulties of their work, and the time devoted to it 
by each. 

(c) The third and last part shall be distributed among those who 
have distinguished themselves, in various labors, either by intel- 
ligence, activity, or vigor. 

Thus, each man, woman, and child, will be entitled to a share 
in each division, proportional to their respective concurrences in 
the production, by their three productive faculties of Capital, Labor, 
and Talent. 

Let us suppose, further, that the inhabitants of this township, 
instead of remaining in their isolated houses, should agree to 
dwell in a large building, or rather, in a row of buildings, separa- 
ted from each other so as to secure the privacy and independence 
of each family, but at the same time, so connected as to render 
available the obvious economies of fire, light, cooking, cellars, 
&c. &c. : that all the different branches of labor were distributed 
among groups of workmen best adapted for the execution of each, 
including in the term of labor, domestic avocations, agriculture, 
mechanical art and instruction ; and that each group should have 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 35 

the entire control of its special department, subject only to the 
advisory direction of a more general and superior group ; we say, 
let this be supposed, and we shall have the outline of the simple, 
but most important re-organization of society which we propose.* 
We do not here assert that an organization of this kind, is the 
true organization for society, although we hold that the position 
can be proved beyond a cavil : we merely wish to show, that 
Society, if it would escape from the terrible evils under which it 
now groans, must resort to some similar organization as the next 
step in its progressive career. We assert that Association by 
townships, as here delineated, if not the right way, at least leads 
toward the right way, and is the best approximation to a Perfect 
Constitution of Society, that has been presented to mankind. We 
assert that it is the most easy, the most feasible, the most safe, the 
most rational, and the most desirable phasis in which we can look 
at the great question of Social Reform. We assert this upon the 
subjoined brief views of 

§ VII. — ITS CHARACTER AND ADVANTAGES. 

1st. It begins with the beginning. It begins with the organ- 
ization of the township, where sagacious minds have long since 
discovered that all reforms, to be efficient and practical, must be- 
gin. Napoleon, whose overwhelming energy of action so absorbs 
our minds, when considering his character, that we are led to for- 
get his deep-searching practical insight, has said in a note, ad- 
dressed about 1800 to his brother Lucien, then Minister of the 
Interior, that " if he had not been distracted by war, he should 
lay the foundation of the prosperity of France in the organization 
of the commune (U commencerait la prosperete de la France par les 
conimuneSy sHl n'etait distrait par la guerre") Thomas Jefferson, 
one of our most profound, and at the same time, most sagacious 
minds, writing to one of his friends, insists that all true political 
reform must begin with small districts. The framers of the 
Federal Constitution felt this when they were so careful to dis- 
tinguish and secure the rights of the states. A consolidated gov- 
ernment, extending over so wide a field of influence, would either 

* Our oBject has been to give only the most elementary view — to suggest, 
rather than describe. We can prove scientifically that the organization here 
sketched, is the one designed by God. 



36 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

fall to pieces from internal conflicts, or be smitten with the death- 
stroke of immobility. State action is the life of the Republic, such 
life as it has. Again : the new class of political reformers, lately 
sprung up in this State, demanding an amendment of the consti- 
tution, are impressed with the necessity of a still further extension 
of the districting principle ; and urge as one of their fundamental 
tenets, that the enormous power now held by the State, shall be 
taken away from it, and returned either to the school districts, 
counties, or towns. 

Now. these politicians are right for once. Experience has 
taught them that nothing is to be done through the cumbersome 
legislation of a too extensive territory. The government of a vast 
nation is too huge and unwieldy to make any active progress. You 
need the quick brain and nimble limbs of a smaller organization. 
A state, comprising, perhaps, millions of individuals, distributed 
over a wide extent of land, and embracing a thousand diverse in- 
terests, has too many wills to consult, to attain true concert and 
harmony of action. Buffalo, for instance, either from ignorance 
or indifference, will not consent to the local reforms necessary in 
the city of New York. Thus, legislation is injuriously delayed, 
or becomes grossly corrupt. The disgraceful system of log- 
rolling, which obtains in all the larger States, has its origin in the 
source to which we refer. Men are compelled, as we see annu- 
ally at Albany and Harrisburg, to buy their palpable rights, by the 
meanest compliances, or the most unblushing bribery. 

It is well, therefore, that our Constitutional Reformers, would 
restore the usurped power of the state, to its legitimate sphere, the 
township. Let one township be successfully organized — and the 
reform would soon expand, like the concentric circles of the water, 
till its circumference embraced the world. Give us one example 
oi a political community founded upon correct and progressive 
principles, and we will answer for the universal adoption of it — 
and that right soon. 

In no other mode, can a system of universal reform be begun. 
Nature, in the formation of the manifold and wondrous series of 
series that go to make up her Whole, begins with a small centre 
of vitality, around which the parts in their beautiful and divine 
order, are arranged according to the glorious law of Variety in 
One — which is the Eternal Fact of Creation. Well, would it be 
for man, did he not presume to be more wise than his Maker. 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 37 

2d. It is peaceful. As it only contemplates voluntary action, 
the only force which it could use, is the force of truth and moral 
suasion. No man's rights would be infringed by it, but on the 
contrary, every legitimate right would receive an additional secu- 
rity. It makes no violent war upon the just privileges of any 
class, proposes no wholesale destruction of the, property of the 
rich, no forced distribution of goods already acquired, deals in no 
bitter and malignant denunciations of any party or sect. It wel- 
comes all ranks of people, it accepts all creeds and doctrines, and 
shows the basis upon which all can be harmonized in variety. 
Good- will, the sentiment of human brotherhood, the love of the 
neighbor are the only feelings to which it appeals. 

When we look back upon the history of the world, we see how 
great a thing this feature of Peace is, in any reform. Christ, in 
that holy moment, when he separated from his poor heart-broken 
disciples, said, " My Peace I give unto you — My Peace I leave 
with you," as though it were the grandest legacy which Omnipo- 
tence could bequeath But the world, in mockery of the divine 
words, would not have Peace but War. Even the professed fol- 
lowers of Jesus, have propagated their faith by violence. They 
have burned Error at the stake, in the persons of its deluded wor- 
shippers, (burning much Truth with it,) and they have spread 
Truth with flashing bayonet and roaring guns. It is heart-sick- 
ening to think how Humanity has only advanced, through fight- 
ings, confusions, explosive overturnings, and volcanic uproar — ■ 
how it has marched forward only amid the horrible discord of 
trumpet-clangors and cannon-vollies — how the masses, to establish 
their rights, have been compelled to wade through seas of b't>od, 
and trample out the hopes and hearts of their fellow men in the 
dust ! The picture seems the more frightful, when we consider 
that at no time has this terrific slaughter been necessary, to ac- 
complish its aims. God, while he permitted it, never designed it ; 
and Man only has been guilty. 

At any rate, let us now hope that the period of violence, 
whether necessary or unnecessary hitherto, is past. Let us hope 
that Mankind, in its modes of growth, will imitate Nature in her 
growth, and expand and enlarge by silent expulsion of the Old 
and the silent absorption of the New. One of our own poets nas 
sung this spirit of Peaceful Reform in his noblest strains, where 
describing the havoc and desolation of " The Winds," he ex- 
claims • 



38 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

" Yet oh ! when the wronged spirit of our race, 

Shall break, as soon he must* his long-worn chains 
And h-ap in freedom from his prison-place, 

Lord of his ancient hills and fruitful plains, 
Let him not rise, like these mad winds of air, 
To waste the loveliness that time could spare, 
To fill the earth with wo, and blot her fair 
Unconscious breast with blood from human veins. 



" But may he like the spring-time come abroad, 

Who crumbles winter's gyves with gentle might, 
When in the genial breeze, the breath of God, 

Come >pouting up the unsealed springs to light; 
Flowers start from their dark prisons at his feet, 
The woods, long-dumb, awake to hymnings sweet, 
And morn and eve, whose glimmerings almost meet, 
Crowd back to narrow bounds the ancient night." 



3d. It is positive. By this, we mean, that the reorganization 
we propose, does not rest upon any mere critical exposition of the 
evils of the present state, but that it is founded in the knowledge 
of a higher and better state. Our criticisms proceed from our con- 
structive principles. We condemn, not according to any imper- 
fect, one-sided, fragmentary, variable standard ; but according to 
what we esteem to be a perfect and universal standard. Having 
discovered what we think the real formula of progressive organ- 
ization, we feel prepared to animadvert upon all conditions which 
are a departure from the truth. The defect of all other methods 
of Reform, is in the fact that they are for the most part negative. 
They see the Wrong, without seeing the Right. For instance : 
there is a class of men who mourn over the desolations of Intem- 
perance, and they denounce the dealers in spirituous liquors, but 
they have no positive remedy for the evil, and therefore their ap- 
peals and denunciations have had only a temporary effect. There 
is another class of brave and warm-hearted philanthropists, whose 
sympathies and convictions are shocked by slave-holding, yet, m 
the midst of their burning invectives and persuasions, they have 
only spread their sentiments, without producing any positive prac- 
tical change. There are societies of tender-hearted females, who 
would rescue the thousands of their debased sisters whom circum- 
stances have driven to the sullied haunts of vice, but for the want 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCKACY. 39 

of positive plans, they excite only ridicule and sarcasm from the 
more sagacious world. There are associations for the reform of 
juvenile delinquents; there are work-houses for the relief of pov- 
erty ; there are a thousand agencies for the extinction of crime ; 
yet delinquency, pauperism, crime, cover the face of society, and 
seem to be rather on the increase. The truth is, that these, 
and various other projects of Reform, are smitten with perpetual 
barrenness, for the want of an impregnating principle. Ihey un- 
doubtedly do good ; they keep alive a tender and benevolent sen- 
timent ; they remove individual cases of suffering ; they impress 
the scoffing world with the conviction that something is ever to be 
done for our fellows ; but, measured by the large scale of what they 
ought to do, they are most lamentably partial and inefficient. They 
are a few drops of oil spread upon a sea, to still a tempest. They 
are a withe of straw held against the raw and cutting east wind. 
Shakspere has said, with hardly more beauty than literal truth : 

44 As far as the little candle throws its beams, 
So shines a good deed upon a n&ughiy world." 

Verily ; your good deeds, your plans of reform are a small candle 
light in a vast world of darknesss, duplicity, and discord. You 
need a deeper insight — a broader groundwork — a mightier princi- 
ple of positive vitality. In the midst of such influences as are 
now around you, a powerful stream of tendencies dragging you 
downward to evil ; the poor, as we have shown,* growing more 
poor and debased, and the rich, more rich and corrupt ; misery 
spreading and multiplying ; cheerless homes and inviting grog- 
shops ; the wages of sempstresses ten cents per day, while the 
wages of sin are as many dollars per night ; political parties ab- 
sorbed in selfish schemes ; and the church, chewing the husks of 
a dead theology, or lapped in luxurious indolence ; and all the 
while your greatest leaders proclaiming that most abominable, most 
cruel of political maxims, that " each man is the best judge of 
his own interest, and therefore must take care of himself"— a 
maxim proceeding from the first born Cain — under such circum- 
stances, it is impossible that your slender, meagre, fragmentary 
plans of reform should succeed. No— you must walk at once into 
the heart of the matter; you must see that the root of all this 

Part First. 



40 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY, 

wrong lies in the false constitution of Society ; you must know 
that there is a better constitution ; and then, laying aside your par- 
tial schemes, plant your foot firmly upon positive universal groun 1. 
None but universal ideas are, at this day, worthy of attention 
Our plan is thus universal, for 

4th. It fulfills all the duties and answers all the ends of Society. 
Man has a right to a living off of the Earth, or he would not have 
been sent here ; and, for the same reason, he has a right to use 
all those elements which are necessary to his full growth and de- 
velopment. The possession of these rights, imposes correspond- 
ing duties on Society. It is the primary, fundamental, most im- 
portant and imperative duty of Society to guaranty his rights to 
every human being. But, no society that ever existed, no society 
that now exists, has discharged tms duty. A majority of men 
have had hard work to get even bread and water enough to keep 
them alive, under the old arrangements, to say nothing of the 
higher wants of the mind and soul. Indeed, a theory has gone 
forth, and is earnestly vindicated in high places, that all society 
has to do, is to protect the person and property of the individual. 
A despicable theory, if it were even carried into practice ! But 
unfortunately, this duty, small as it is, has not been met. Society 
has not protected property. It is true, the property of the rich has 
been hedged around with the thick- set fences of all law, learning 
and public opinion. Accumulated Labor in the shape of Capital, 
is the golden fruit, watched by many-headed dragons ; but living, 
breathing Labor, which is the poor man's only property, is flung 
loose to the winds, left to shift for itself, without guaranty, with- 
out protection. Yet, society pays a fearful penalty for this neg- 
lect of its duty. Its armies of paupers, its alms-houses, its prisons, 
its soup and clothing charities, its taxes, demonstrate with vivid 
clearness, how much better it would be for it to stop evils at their 
source. This can only be done by the thorough reorganization 
which we propose — an organization which would secure to every 
man, woman, and child, (1.) the means of comfortable subsistence, 
such as a clean house, wholesome food, decent clothes, and the 
privacy of their families; (2.) the opportunities of education, in 
elementary branches of knowledge, in the business of life, in the 
positive sciences, and in the general principles of fine arts; (3.) 
and facilities of intercourse with their fellows, with a position to 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 41 

be affected by all the gentler and more refined influences of learned 
and polite conversation and deportment. 

It is because we believe that an organization, according to our 
principles, would secure these ends, that we have ventured to 
speak of Democracy. Never was there a word more abused — 
never was there a word more profoundly significant. It does not 
mean that ferocious spirit of levelling, which, in the French Re- 
volution, crumbled the entire Past, and even plucked God from 
his throne; nor yet the wild, dirty, and turbulent mobism, which, 
in this country, covers with the slime of its nithiness, every char- 
acter that is purer and nobler than itself : but it does not mean a 
condition of society in which the least individual shall have his 
rights acknowledged, and the means and opportunities for the 
fullest expansion of his faculties guarantied. It means a social 
state, where the whole of life, for nine-tenths of the people, shall 
not be a suicidal struggle for life — where the finer essences of the 
soul shall not be ground out to furnish bare nutriment for the 
body — where none of its families shall esteem it a curse to have 
children born to them — where honesty and diligence, not impu- 
dence and falsehood, shall be the measures of success, and where 
noble thoughts and generous emotions shall not be trampled out, 
because forsooth, they are not what the worldly-wise deem prac- 
ticable or prudent. But the great fact of the Brotherhood of Man 
shall be recognized — that Humanity is a living organism, of which 
every individual is a member — each in his sphere, bound to his 
fellows and the whole, as the arm or the foot is bound to the 
body— a partaker in their wrongs — a suflerer of their diseases — a 
sharer in their felicity, and a co-worker with them for good and 
evil. Then, in tie arrangements of the State, the reconciling max- 
ims of distributive equity shall take the place of the insane and 
destructive doctrines of positive equality — the slavery of pauper- 
ism and vice shall be succeeded by rational freedom — and the 
palsying stagnation of hopeless and remediless conservatism give 
way to the healthful agitation of conservative progress. 

5th. It is a direct manifestation of the Spirit of Christianity, y 
No fact in the life of Christ, (and he was the highest form of his 
religion,) strikes us more forcibly than the comprehensiveness of 
his benevolence. Reinhard, in his admirable work, " The Plan 
of Jesus," attempts to prove his divinity by the very fact that he 



42 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 

was thus universal. His utterances, his prayers, his miracles, 
all evince the depth and tenderness of his sympathy with Man. 
He took the little children into his arms; he multiplied the wine 
at the festivities of Galilee ; he fed the poor believing crowd, not 
so wise as the prudent Pharisees ; and he washed the feet of his 
sorrowing disciples, that he might show how much he loved all 
his fellow-men. He wished to testify that it was oar chief duty 
to minister to each other, to call no man master, to lord it over no 
man, to make life a perpetual scene of mutual helpfulness and 
service. Such was his spirit — and this spirit he intended should 
be manifested in the organization of society. The outward must 
ever be an expression of the inward, if we would be true to our 
principles. The form must correspond with the in-dwelling law 
— the external tenement with the idea of its inhabitant. 

What then is the law which Christian Society ought to embody 
or incarnate : " Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, with all thy 
heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy soul. This is the 
first and great commandment : and the second is like unto it — 
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two command- 
ments hang all the law and the prophets. — (Matt, xxvii. 57.) 

A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one ano- 
ther; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. — (John, 
xii. 34.) 

All things whatsoever you would that men should do unto you, 
do you even so to them ; for this is the law and the prophets. — 
(Matt. vii. 12.) 

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and its justice, and all worldly 
things shall be added unto you. — (Matt. vi. 33.) 

Ask and it shall be given you T ; seek and ye shall find ; knock 
and it shall be opened. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Ye are all one, as I and 
my father are one. — (John.) For as the body is one — so also is 
Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, 
whether we be Jews or Gentiles, bond or free, &c. That there 
should be no schism (disunity) in the body; but that the members 
should have the same care one for another. And whether one 
member suffer, all the members suffer with it ; or one member be 
honored, all the members rejoice with it," 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCKACY. 43 

CONCLUSION. 

We have hinted in the course of this essay at the following 
points, any one of which might be easily expanded into a volume : 

1. That there is, in civilized society, a rapid increase of popu- 
lation, without any due provision by society for its employment 
or support. 

2. That the working classes, who are a majority everywhere, 
by the present system of blind competition, are picking each others 
pockets and cutting each others throats. 

3. That, according to the admission of nearly all the distin- 
guished political economists, the condition of laborers is rapidly 
deteriorating. 

4. That the continued invention of labor-saving machinery is 
still further tending to the reduction of all laborers for the sake of 
the capitalists. 

5. That Capital is more and more concentrating in the hands of 
the few, who are thus forming an oppressive Money-Feudalism. 

6. That no political party has as yet proposed any measure that 
in the remotest degree touches the root of these evils. 

7. That some plan for the unity of the material interests of men 
is the only one that can prevent our downward tendencies. 

8. That this plan is presented in the doctrine of Association, 
on the basis of Attractive Industry. 

These principles we present to the public. Individually we 
have nothing to gain or to lose by their adoption or rejection. Our 
only interest in seeking to spread them, is derived from our strong 
conviction of their truth, and our urgent hope that something will 
be done for humanity. We know that we shall excite prejudice ; 
we know that ridicule and scorn has been heaped upon us with- 
out measure ; but we know, at the same time, that we act in sin- 
cerity, and we leave the rest to God. We are confident of victory. 
Already the white light of the rising sun is caught upon the 
mountain-tops — already we see the streaks of the coming day. 
Whence the present unusual ferment of the public mind ? Why 
are the deepest religious feelings of the soul, the oldest religious 
institutions, undergoing such sifting and earnest controversy ? Is 
it not that the world is travailing in the birth-throes of a mighty 
and better Future ? Even the ephemera of literature are seized 



44 CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC -DEMOCRACY. 

with the common sympathy, and become unconscious prophets 
of the days about to be. Why do your Eugene Sues probe the 
sores and secret wounds of your diseased society, and hold all 
nations captive by their pictures of Humanity in her hunger- 
stricken, straw-covered lairs ? Why tingles the blood, when the 
pen of Dickens — lately so false to his own genial nature — exposes 
the want, and wretchedness, and cureless griefs of the poor ? It 
is because you know in your hearts, that all is wrong with your 
miserable death-struck societies, and that you inwardly long for 
the Better Time. It is because you would like to join- in- 
some practicable and generous movement for the extirpation of 
pauperism and crime. That movement is at hand ! The field of 
battle is before you ; but, oh ! how different the weapons and ob- 
jects from those of former warfares. Our weapons are truth, 
justice and religion Our objects, universal conciliation, and uni- 
versal love. Unity and Peace are the banner-words of our host. 
Says Mr. Carlyle, in his last and greatest work, " £ast anc [ Pres- 
ent," " Not on Ilions or Latium's plains ; on far other plains and 
places henceforth, can noble deeds be now done. Not on Ilion's 
plains ; how much less in Mayfair drawing-rooms ! Not in vic- 
tory over poor brother French or Phrygians ; but in victory over 
Frost-jotuns, Marsh-giants : over demons of Discord, Idleness, In- 
justice, Unreason, and Chaos come again. None of the old Epics 
is longer possible. The Epic of French and Phrygians is com- 
paratively a small Epic ; but that of Flirts and Fribbles, what is 
that ? A thing that vanishes at cock-crowing, that already begins 
to scent the morning air." 

■" But it is to you, ye workers, who do already work, and are 
as grown men, noble and honorable in a sort, that the whole world 
calls for new work and nobleness. Subdue Mutiny, Discord, 
wide-spread Despair, by manfulness, Justice, Mercy and Wisdom. 
Chaos is dark — deep as Hell: let light be, and there is instead a 
green flowery world. Oh ! it is great, and there is no other great- 
ness. To make some nook of God's creation a little fruitfuller, 
better, more worthy of God ; to make some human hearts a little 
wiser, manfuller, happier — more blessed, less accursed ! It is 
work for a God. Sooty Hell, of Savagery, Mutiny and Despair, 
can, by man's energy, be made a kind of Heaven ; cleared of its 



CONSTRUCTIVE AND PACIFIC DEMOCRACY. 45 

soot, of its Mutiny, of its need of Mutiny ; the everlasting arch 
of Heaven's azure overspanning it too, as a birth of Heaven ; God 
and all men looking on it well-pleased. Unstained by wasteful 
deformities, by wasted tears, or heart's blood of Men, or any de- 
facement of the Pit, noble, fruitful Labor, growing ever nobler — 
will come forth, the Grand Sole Miracle of Man." 



THE END. 



APPENDIX. 



DEPRESSION OF LABOR. 

The Industrial System, which has transformed the serf into the op- 
erative, and prepared the way for Modern Feudalism, which we insist 
is no advance on the Feudalism of the Middle Ages, is beginning to 
attract the attention, not only of radicals and socialists, but of politi- 
cians and statesmen. Its effects in reducing labor to a state of com- 
plete servitude to capital, and, therefore, the operative to the proprietor, 
is beginning to be seen, and to be felt, in the unspeakable misery and 
distress of the laboring classes. The great fact can be no longer con- 
cealed or denied, that the. present economical system of what are 
called the more advanced nations of Christendom, places labor at the 
mercy of capital, and every increase of wealth on the part of the few 
is attended by a more than corresponding increase of poverty and dis- 
tress on the part of the many. Here is the fact. Men may gloss it 
over as they will, ascribe it to this cause or to that ; but here is the 
fact. The richest nation in the world is the poorest ; abundance su- 
perinduces want, and, with the general increase of wealth, the mass of 
laborers find themselves reduced to the starving point, and rapidly fall- 
ing below it. This is the fact our social reformers see, and seek to 
remedy. Our own labors for twenty years have been devoted almost 
exclusively to the great work of ascertaining the means by which labor 
may be emancipated, and the acquisition of wealth prevented from be. 
coming a public curse. 

Brownson's Quarterly Review, for April, 1844. 

RICH AND POOR IN ENGLAND. 

A candidate for Parliament stated that all the arable lands in Eng- 
land were owned by thirty-three thousand proprietors. I called on the 
officers of the Statistical Society in St. Martin's Lane, in London, to 
ascertain the truth of this statement. At their request I committed 
several interrogatories to writing, which they said should be answered 
when the results of the census, then in press, were known. Three 
months thereafter they told me that the statistics of England did not 



48 APPENDIX. 

afford the information required. A similar statement was afterward 
made by a member of Parliament ; and, as it was never contradicted, 
it may be regarded as true — that the cultivated lands from which the 
English are fed, belong to thirty-three thousand persons. The chief 
among them are the members of Parliament, and the hereditary no- 
bility, born to power as well as to riches. They have established a 
code of laws for their own benefit, the most inhuman known in the 
annals of legislation. Not only are their own estates exempt from 
general taxation, but the cultivation of them is forced upon the people 
by prohibiting the importation of every article of food from abroad. 
The poor laborer is at their mercy ; from them he receives his bread ; 
and his wife and children must be fed on such terms as they prescribe. 
There is no escape ; ignorant and destitute, he cannot take refuge in 
foreign countries, where his proud oppressor cannot pursue. Pie is 
starved to the lowest point of endurance ; yet life is spared. Sufficient 
strength to till the earth is kept up by gruel and potatoes, provided by 
the poor laws or the landlords themselves, as oats are given to horses 
that they may bear the burthens heaped upon their backs. There is 
policy in oppression ; if the cords were drawn too tight, the poor peas- 
ant would die, and thus the greediness of the rich would consume 
themselves. 

There are five millions of laborers who cultivate the earth, and six 
millions of operatives engaged in manufactures, who possess no land, 
no, not a mole-hill ; no vote, no home but at the will of a landlord ; 
are hungry from morning till night, and sleep and die on straw. If to 
these be added three millions of paupers fed at the public charge ; the 
beggars that frequent the streets and highways ; the poor mechanics 
and journeymen, prostitutes and laborers of every description, it may 
be safely affirmed, that out of the twenty-six millions that inhabit the 
three kingdoms, twenty millions — men, women and children — daily 
feel the yearnings of unsatisfied appetite. There is not a day that the 
newspapers do not tell some piteous tale of destitution, and too often 
has the surgeon's knife proved starvation to be the cause of death. In 
1842, the poor of Preston cut and eat the flesh of a cow that died of 
disease, which they dug up from the common where it had been buried. 
The fact was published without contradiction in all the leading prints 
of the kingdom. 

The English are, indeed, a great people. They hold two sceptres, 
by sea and by land ; they have stretched their vast dominions to the 
outer limits of the earth ; they have reached the summit of human 
glory ; but it is glory in rags. Of all nations, they are at once the 
richest and the poorest ; the proudest and the most servile, the wisest 
and the most ignorant. Five thousand persons, titled, of right, and by 
courtesy, are provided for by their constitution ; a few professional 
men, manufacturers, merchants, and tradesmen, have provided for 
themselves ; they spend their lives in a perpetual gorgeous holiday, 
while the naked, needy multitude live in a constant struggle for 
bread. 



APPENDIX. 49 

During the years 1841-2-3, 1 entered 122 cottages in Somersetshire, 
Devonshire, Lancashire, Warwickshire, Surrey, Middlesex, and Kent, 
always with a view to understand a subject in which I felt a deep and 
abiding interest. My first visit to Somersetshire disclosed the whole 
truth ; I had nothing further to leam, thanthat the same wretchedness, 
the same round of potatoes and salt, the same appalling picture oi 
wretchedness and rags, prevailed throughout the kingdom. 

Judge Carlton, in the Democratic Review. 



FEELINGS OF THE POOR TOWARD THE 

RICH. 



No man ever hears of a laboring peasant rising into an owner of 
land. The feudal system binds them as tightly to the soil as ever they 
were bound. They are as much adscript! glebce, as in the Conqueror's 
time, with this difference, that when old age disables them, instead of 
a place below the salt at their owner's table, they have the work-house 
to retire to. . They are the Pariahs of English society. And, as a 
consequence of this miserable and benighted condition, in which the 
whole mass of society appears to them one cruel, heartless jest, the 
well-being of the upper classes * the arch fiend's mock/ they burn corn 
sracks and farm steadings, and would, doubtless, burn chateaux, too, 
like the French peasants in 1793, if they dared. It is now established, 
beyond the possibility of any reasonable denial, that feelings of the bit. 
terest hostility to their masters, and of desperate disaffection to the present 
order of things pervade the peasantry ; that in most instances of wilful 
fire raising, the whole neighboring population are accessories after the 
fact ; that they look with apathetic indifference, if not with gratified 
revenge, upon the wanton destruction of life and property. 

Liverpool Mercury. 



NO REMEDY FOR THE SUFFERING POOR. 



At the last meeting of the London Statistical Society, a remarkable 
paper, which touches the internal condition of Ireland, was read by 
Mr. Chadwick, the author of the Sanitary Reports, that have attracted 
attention in both hemispheres. This paper is included in The Supple- 
mentary Sanitary Report, worthy of being studied by every political 
economist and municipal administrator. The primary purpose of the 
author is to correct the mistake, as he deems it, of Dr. Price and other 
statistical writers of authority, by whom " the proportions of deaths to 
the population, and the average age of death, are treated as equiva- 
lent." The London Morning Chronicle describes the paper thus : 






50 APPENDIX. 

« The whole document is replete with interest, and shows that tore 
is a process of deterioration going on among our population, which 
13 a pruLc»= nnssiblv check. Even emigration, by ltseli, 

^^5j^ toSrifiSi.Uwoddte-d to accelerate to 

rite at wlfh a .tented, *mt*M, iwmdfe .population is rapul lj 
rate ai wmi.ii ., f h gre atest sickness and mortality. 

W:Zl i: auJht to s range wonderful, and appalling fact, tot 
ffl^ln t Liter insufficient food, insufficient means of living, m- 
Zf of bein* ^^che;r t o population, constitute one of its W or S * stimu- 
Cs becaus^nnder such a" state of things we have a greater number 
oTbir'ths a larger amount of early deaths, and a more depkirabe 
cond uon of mortality, than where to people are well-fed and well- 
housed The subject is one of the very gravest importance. 

This however is not to first time that the fact has been proclaimed , 
noS t so strange or wonderful. The results of the absence of moral 
*Wk, ™ the increase of population were long ago indicated, and 
^of^SJSition 1 ^ misery on the ages of death are quite 
obvious Mr. Chadwick explains and works out his positron, first, by 

necessarily greatest. Washington National Intelligencer. 

POVERTY IN THE STATE OF NEW-YORK. 

An aWract of the annual returns from to Superintendents of to 

Potr\ubmit ted b? The Secretary of State to to I*^*™.^ 

I the Mbany Argus. These returns embrace every county in to 

. ..nHrPwal In extent of pauperism which we did not suppose to 

£*.' and whfeh 1st astonish our readers. From this statement of 

of the inhabitants. 



6 



APPENDIX. 51 

The whole expenditure for the poor, during 1843, is. ...... . ..,,...., $592,353 2$ 

But the value of the labor of the paupers, amounting to. ...... > _. 58,053 8': 

Must be deducted, and the net expense is .^33,691 44 

which is raised by direct taxation, 

During J^42, the expense was... ..$517,738 02 

Deduct pauper labor... ; ... o 57,133 30 

$460,604 7-2 

Thus showing an increase of pauper expenses of the year 1843 over 

those of 1842 of $72,989 72, or an increase in a single year of over 

15 per cent, in the expenditures. The average weekly expense of each 

pauper during the year 

1843, was 53 cents and 2 mills. 

1842, was ...64 ' 6 " 

This shows that the expense of supporting each pauper has decreased 
8 per cent., and yet the whole aggregate of expenses has increased 15 
per cent. This solely arises from an increase in the numi ^r of pau- 
pers. This increase was 21,314 over the preceding year. 

It will be remembered that the large numbers of poor Familk ? 
*ieved by various charitable societies and private benefactions, are not 
included in these returns. If, therefore, ike number of those who are 
e habit of receiving aid from the German, Scotch, Irish, Italian 
Vejsh, Benevolent and Emigrant Societies, from the funds of different 
iiurches, created for purposes of p^rm relief, from the various Clotti- 
ng and Sewing societies, instituted .. • • ■■- volent ladies, anc e 
donations of individuals, were added tc Cae Lumber of State i ..apers, 
we have no doubt that the ratio of paujjers to other inhabitants would 
be greatly increased. IS&w-Yoik Evening Post. 

New-York is one of the richest, if net the richest, agricultural state 
in the Union, 3 r et 1 in 17 of its inhabitants are supported by chi 
In the city of New- York, the Alms-house have administered relief, : 
the year 1843, to 40 000 persons I This is at the rate of 1 tc < J of t! . - 
population, r 

THE VAMPYRE OF COMMERCE. 

We find, in a Michigan paper, me following atexn^nt of the a 
bution of the annua'. \n earth of this country. It is taken from a Lettei 
addressed by Mr. S. Denton, of Michigan, to : - State Farmers' Com 
vention. 

" Ttat wealth i& but il zecumvffathd nations of bmm-, is a car- 
dinal and obvious truths Y hich none will pretend to deny. But Low 
is it, that those who create it a!i 3 are enabled to retain sc hi : : r theii 
own share, is a phei . f n whjjch ret uii 3S eij Is ■-. 

What suni ii ■ . represent the /al ilpro'dup.13 

of the U- h 



52 APPENDIX. 

Different answers have been given to this interesting question by 
various statisticians, some estimating them as high as 1300, and others 
as high as 15 or 1600 millions of dollars. 

But in these estimates, I have found that several large items have 
been twice and others thrice reckoned. For instance, our wool is first 
estimated, and then it is again reckoned in our manufactured woollens, 
and just so of our cotton and cotton goods. 

Our grain is first estimated, and then reckoned over again in the 
products of our flouring mills. The annual value of our lumber, bricks, 
and lime, is first put down and then it is all re-estimated in the value 
of the buildings annually erected. The lumber, metals, cordage, &c, 
are first estimated and then reckoned over again, in the annual value 
of ships built, and the- cordage, sails, &c, had been estimated once 
previously in the value of the flax and hemp crops ; and thus we might 
go on through a very large catalogue. It will be readily perceived that 
this mode of analysis, will reduce the estimates of some economists 
very much. 

We have deducted one item more from our estimates, viz: the ne- 
cessary subsistence of the laborers. Food, clothing and lodging are 
indispensable, even for slaves : and all that is absolutely necessary for 
that object, we have excluded in our calculations, and thus make the 
aggregate annual products of industry, of all the laboring classes of the 
United States, over and above so much food and clothing, as a master 
in the pursuit of his own interest, would allow his slaves, amount to 
$1,046,186,000. 

Now, it is obvious, that all the wealth which any man, or any class 
of men in the United States obtains in any way, is derived directly or 
indirectly, from this original sum. 

Now, if we can arrive at the sum which each class of non-producers 
annually receives, the remainder will be the amount left for distribu- 
tion, among those who create it all. 

For this purpose we have gone into a very thorough and minute ex- 
amination, to ascertain the amount annually distributed to each of the 
non-producing classes, in the United States, viz : 

The amount distributed to the Lawyers, and all others ex- 
gaged in the administration of the law ; 

The amount distributed to the Bankers and Brokers, &c. ; 

The amount distributed for Township, County, State, Village. 
Town, City and National Government purposes ; 

The amount distributed to our Merchants ; 

The amount added to the Public Burthens, consequent upon the 
present mode of collecting the United States Revenue, &c. &c. 

These aggregate sums amount to $889,087,409, leaving for distri- 
bution among the laborers, $157,097,591. This is the laborers' por- 
tion over and above such necessaries as a prudent master would pro- 
vide for a slave, when acting in conformity to his own interests. 

But for the sake of being on the safe side in these calculations and 
for the purpose of reducing the figures to round numbers, I will call the 



APPENDIX. 53 

latter sum 206 millions, and the former sum 900 millions of dollars,, 
making 1100 millions of dollars in all." 



MACHINERY, vs. MEN, 



The subjoined is an extract from a* report, read to a meeting of 
workingmen, held in this city, in March, 1844. It will be a significant 
met to many, to state that the remedy hinted at in the same report, 
was an equal division of the land. 

" Having made due inquiry into the facts, the committee are satisfied 
that there is a much larger number of laboring people congregated in 
the seaboard towns, that can find constant and profitable employment. 
Your committee do not think it necessary to enter into statistical de- 
tails in order to prove a fact that is not disputed by anybody. 

The result of this over-supply of laffor is a competition among the 
laborers, tending to reduce wages, even where employment is obtained, 
to a scale greatly below what is necessary for the comfortable subsist- 
ence of the workingman, and the education of his family. 

It appears to your committee, that as long as the supply of labor 
exceeds the demand, the natural laws which regulate prices, will ren- 
der it very difficult, if not altogether impossible, to permanently improve 
the condition of the working people. 

Our inquiries, therefore, were naturally directed to ascertain how far 
existing causes are likely to affect the supply and demand of labor — 
whether those causes tend to lessen, or increase the evil under which 
the working classes are now suffering. 

As tending to lessen the evil, we find an increasing home consump- 
tion of articles produced by mechanical skill — we also anticipate an 
increase, to some extent at least, of our export market. 

But we believe that this additional demand is by no means likely to 
keep pace with our accumulating powers of production. First, we find 
in our cities and factory stations, an increasing population, the great 
majority of whom depend for a subsistence on mechanical labor ; and 
secondly, we find the new-born power of machinery throwing itself 
into competition with our working population. Indeed, if we judge of 
the next half century, by the half century just past, there will be, by the 
end of that time, little mechanical labor performed by human hands. 

We find, on consulting authentic data, that machinery has taken 
almost entire possession of the manufacture of cloth. That it is ma- 
king steady — we might say rapid — advance upon all branches of iron 
manufacture. That the newly invented machine-saws, working in 
curves as well as straight lines — the planing and grooving machine, 
and the tenon and mortice machine, clearly admonish us that its em- 
pire is destined to extend itself over all our manufactures of wood. 
That while some of the handicrafts are already extinct, there is not one 
of them but has foretasted the overwhelming competition of this occult 



- * APPENDIX. 

po we, We can ^JTm^SS^S^SSZ 

'^ifr'esti^triamph of u^^o^^^V^ 

yam as 25,300 men could have donf s unde r uk y . jn evety supe . 

Ane, will set 1,000 looms to wo k On ot «se intends several looms, 

< iut,; , n.'S^^^s&s t,mt happen t0 '" p 

S„W belongs to ^ Dictionary of Arts. m , ht be ab , 

? "te-WS ^fb^e.' of %Sn in a day. Now, one watermil. 

^SSfflff^^ja^»J»«- l^med b y machin- 

! " s^SSS^^^ has the faculty ° tepto " 

"ki e^oyment wbicb out lakes and rivets promised to affoM r numerous 

T m &$?SitZlZ%£^%* * -ty insecure dependence to out 

%cbinet y ,"savs D ,Ute^i^^ 

tute of hat ," butbe adds that it is k^**^*'^ Britain, and the Doctor pre- 
Wless combination of the purneymen. 2«» B he ius of machinery, 
die s hat h^ combination will f°" ^'"too-t ^ntir possession. The recent ta- 
in ropemaking, the machine has taken al mo t en ^ ^ number o f regu , 
movements enable 4 or 5 men to d°*e wwk or , ^ has d 

hands. Such is the distress and ' desperation t ^ beM destI0ye d m 

£ working -», that jevetal '• mach^hous^^^ ^ ^ ^^ immed , 

= iS!rn f oS-apowerfu, kneading machine is coming into e. 

tensive use in England. nerformed by machinery. To this also 

Two-thirds of our carpenter-work i»»wF' *„,„ be i ongs almost, to a 

fe It coming with out ship-builders /The ^P.^ band at type-setting. In cu^ 

feteTe^e^^ 

Xt! garments of an elegant style are ™wmf .n England ^ ^ navigat e the 

K the > way ^--po;^^-^ atwork in another quartet cut- 
^u^-nlfhr^maSerro^Van'kee clocks. 






APPENDIX. 55 

tion of human labor — can not, in the opinion of your committee, be 
averted. We may wrestle with the monster, as the toilers of England 
wrestle, till myriads of us perish in the unequal strife. But your com- 
mittee are of opinion, that all this will be only so much strife, and so 
much suffering wasted in vain. As well might we interfere with the 
career of the heavenly bodies, or attempt to alter any of Nature's fixed 
laws, as hope to arrest the onward march of science and machinery." 

The author has cut these paragraphs from the newspapers, &c. of 
the day, while the body of his work was in press. He might, with a 
little labor, add ten thousand more confirmations of the views he has 
advanced. 



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